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2010-05-04 issue:

NEWS ANALYSIS: Getting serious about being missional

Joining in God’s activity in the world, We develop and nurture missional Mennonite congregations of many cultures.

by David Boshart

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By adopting this mission statement, developing "missional Mennonite congregations of many cultures" becomes the central task of Mennonite Church USA. This statement positions us to imagine a future where, in the words of Emil Brunner, "the church exists by mission, just as fire exists by burning."

While the word "missional" continues to gain significance in our denomination, what it looks like to be a missional church remains elusive to many. Such is the case when we try to create a new world with our words.

Are we making progress in our attempts to embody the missional reality we desire? Is there need for course correction? In seeking answers to these questions, I conducted empirical research within Mennonite Church USA that identified a number of tensions that will need to be managed as we seek to embody the nature of a missional church. These tensions can inform how our denomination might best help increase positive missional tendencies while decreasing anti-missional tendencies that persist. I will describe five of these.

1. The first tension is the transition from being a sending church to an understanding of the church as itself sent.

The institutionalization of the church in the 20th century reinforced notions that people are formed for ministry somewhere else for someplace else. Somewhere along the way, the church no longer saw the local context as a primary resource for spiritual formation and equipping for ministry. Some are sent, others stay home to support those who are formed for ministry in other places.

This is an anti-gospel understanding. Jesus understood the mission context as the preferred place to imagine how the kingdom is announced and witnesses embody the gospel (Luke 10). In order to increase positive missional tendencies, we will need to see the congregation as a primary place of formation for ministry so that all are sent.

2. The second tension is between replication and reproduction.

When we tell stories of churches that demonstrate “successful” missional practice, there is a persistent tendency to copy the activities and programs that appear to be successful.
Years ago, in response to a devastating upset in the hog market, our congregation began an annual hog roast to which our rural neighborhood was invited. As soon as this story was reported in the church press, I was amused to learn of five Mennonite congregations planning hog roasts for their neighbors. A number of them were town churches.

We need to tell these "success" stories in a way that highlights how congregations and their leaders are exegeting their community resulting in a contextually appropriate ministry. Recently, contextual exegesis has been named as one of the essential six pastoral competencies for missional leadership.

3. The third tension answers the question, For whom does the church exist?

There is a deep and persistent belief that the church exists for us rather than for the sake of the world. Conrad Kanagy's Road Signs for the Journey confirms this tendency.
After the preaching role, pastors understand their primary role as shaping the congregation’s vision and equipping members for ministry. After the preaching role, congregational members hope the pastor’s primary role is to provide pastoral care and counseling to the members.

Mennonites have a gift for hosting the stranger, so long as the space into which the stranger is welcomed remains "our" space. Becoming a missional church will require us to get hosted into the world’s space and, in our spiritual discernment with the stranger, create a new space to incarnate the reign of God.

But much of our organizational energy has been focused on helping existing congregations be smoother-running machines for our members rather than forming every member for witness in the world.

4. Related to the third tension is the tension between focusing on boundaries or the center when it comes to matters of faith and life.

At some level, boundaries help us. We need to know the difference between the church and the world. In the words of Andrew Walls, we need to remain clear how the gospel is at home in every culture and how it is foreign to every culture. What is needed is a common understanding of how to read the Scriptures that reveal the way of Jesus.

The more clearly the center is articulated, the less attention boundaries require. The challenge in this tension is to equip the church to get better at naming the way of Jesus as the true way. We need a denominational system that can build our competency for scriptural discernment at every level of the church.

5. There is a tension within the church that has to do with our identity in the world. 

There is the tension between the church that reflects dominant social values vs. understanding the church as engaged in but different from society. We struggle to understand what it means to be the church in a society that is not hostile to the church; society simply acts as though the church doesn’t matter very much.

There remains a persistent consumer mentality within Mennonite Church USA that believes the church exists to help me live the life I have chosen a little bit better—which looks a lot like the American dream—rather than helping us be the vanguard of “the life that is to come.”

Here are two examples that demonstrate progress in our aim to become a missional church.

1. At the Mennonite Church USA Convention in Columbus, Ohio, last year, delegates were more assertive in their call to be engaged in discerning the missional direction of the church than we have heard from previous delegations. The spiritual practice of dwelling in the Word received more affirmation from the delegates than anything else that happened in the assembly. The delegates are now pressing the Executive Board to integrate practices like dwelling in the Word into the discernment of our common faith and life as a seamless cloth. The delegates present denominational leaders a tremendous opportunity when they want the Bible to be more integrated in their discernment.

2. Delegates observed that Vision: Healing and Hope is growing in influence throughout the denomination. Vision: Healing and Hope is a thoroughly missional statement. Delegates—and here I quote from one group of delegates—asked denominational leaders to "be radical in changing the organizational makeup of the church to more clearly reflect our vision."

Let me suggest two key ingredients that can contribute to this radical approach to organizational change. First, the greatest opportunity for increasing our positive missional tendencies is to learn from those who are "working at the front." Those working at the front think about contextualization and incarnation in ways our existing congregations often don't. Those working at the front do it because they must. Our mission statement says that "we will develop and nurture Mennonite missional congregations of many cultures."

To date, our organizational system has focused almost entirely on the nurture of existing congregations while the development of missional Mennonite congregations has been, at best, a marginal focus in the denominational system. If we hope our denomination becomes a missional church, then we will no longer see church plants as our junior partners to whom we write checks and commission leaders.

The first key ingredient for radical organizational alignment is a denominational system that moves the developing congregations into the center of our structure as essential partners in a learning community where we all ask how the reign of God is being incarnated in authentic and contextual ways.   

Second, some organizational models will reinforce positive missional tendencies more than others. In the 20th century, Mennonites learned to view the mission of the church in mechanistic or instrumental terms focused on accountable results. Because God is the determiner of results in a missional church, organizational alignment directed by accounting our results is not well matched to the goal of becoming a missional church.

To become missional we will need to shift our focus from measuring results to measuring meaning. This requires a paradigm shift from adaptive learning to generative learning and from mechanistic discussion to reflexive dialogue. Adaptive learning is focused on how we “keep our ground.” Rather than ask, What are we accomplishing?
generative learning asks the questions, What is being expressed that sounds like God's mission? What is being attracted? and, What is being legitimized? Mechanistic approaches to organizational change cast the church as a problem that needs to be solved.  Reflexive dialogue suspends our assumptions and opens the space for the Spirit to move us to imagine new worlds. A second key ingredient for radical organizational alignment is an approach to organizational alignment that is focused less on accountable results and more on generative learning and reflexive dialogue.

David Boshart is a member of Mennonite Church USA’s Executive Board and first presented this research at the September 2009 all-boards meeting. Boshart is the pastor of the West Union Mennonite Church in Parnell, Iowa.

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Vision: Healing and Hope
God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flows through us to the world.

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